Please log in

or

Register now for free

or

Choose your profile *

Email *

A valid e-mail address. All e-mails from the system will be sent to this address. The e-mail address is not made public and will only be used if you wish to receive a new password or wish to receive certain news or notifications by e-mail.

Password *

Username *

Sign up to our newsletters

Higher education updates from the THE editorial team

World University Rankings news

Student newsletters

Send me special offers and marketing info from THE and selected partners

Letter: Freedom under threat

We write to express our dismay and concern over the recent dismissals of three academics: Robert Shell from Rhodes University, Caroline White from the University of Natal and Ted Steele from the University of Wollongong.

All three cases suggest that the right of academics to criticise their university administrations is becoming increasingly threatened, as is the principle of academic freedom. Robust criticism is all too easily coming to be construed as defamation or "bringing the university into disrepute".

We also see the principle of tenure, for long a major safeguard of academic freedom, being seriously endangered. In each case, no felony was committed by the dismissed academic. Rather, the dismissals were the result of disputes with superiors or criticisms directed at the university authorities. In the cases of Shell and White, the universities' disciplinary action rested largely or in part on the content of private email messages sent by the two.

The universities' ready resort to judicial procedures strikes us as being inappropriate in these three cases, which ought to have been resolved by more informal means.

We deplore the dismissal of Shell, whose case we know best. Shell, director of the Rhodes population research unit, was fired after a dispute with the university in which he accused it of not fulfilling its contractual obligations, of lack of transformation and of nepotism. The university denied the claims. A disciplinary hearing ruled that Shell had brought the university into disrepute and was guilty of serious misconduct amounting to breach of contract.